Josef PFEFFER was born in Vienna on January 1, 1912 and was married to a seamstress named Margarete Pfeffer. He was employed by the Wiener Staedtische insurance company and lived in Salzburg after he turned 20 in 1932.
He was Socialist Party activist until the party was outlawed, and after 1934 he served as the provincial director for the illegal Revolutionary Austrian Socialist organization in Salzburg. In 1936 he was convicted of violating the Austro-Fascists’ national security laws and sentenced to 10 months of strict imprisonment.
After the March 1938 absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany he helped organize the escape of some Jewish functionaries of the Socialist Party, but he was arrested on July 3, 1938 and indicted for conspiracy to commit treason. On June 10, 1939 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and later he was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg. He was murdered there on January 28, 1945 when he was 33 years old.
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 28.08.2008 at Salzburg, Maxglaner Hauptstraße 52
Josef PfefferPhoto: Archive of the Communist Party of Austria